Posted
by
Zonk
on Monday October 09, 2006 @07:11AM
from the game-over-man-game-over dept.

The New York Times is reporting on the final rush to bug fix Windows Vista. Even with massive numbers of testers and five years of work behind them, the folks in Redmond are pushing it to the wire in order to make sure it releases soon. From the article: "Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft. Such data supplements the company's own testing in a center for Office referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less interesting name -- Windows Test Technologies.) This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly while looking for errors."

I think this "special software" would be more accurately described as a series of macros and scripts (in the dumbed down, Microsoft sense of the word) with a simple monitor listening for errors being written to the logs. As we all know, Microsoft logs are often woefully underpowered at recording major system errors. Of course this is a hunch but based on my past experience with Microsoft (dating back to the early days of DOS 2.0)I think it is a decent one.

I know a guy who used to work on test suites at Microsoft who has since quit, given their awful attitude towards bugs in Vista, and got a Mac

You'll see this kind of attitude in every bigger software company. I've had personal experiences like this in Adobe and Macromedia with their flagship products. Features are dropped, specs constantly changing and inconsistent between teams.

In some cases, you can spot the same feature implemented twice in source, with different interfaces, in different locations, and code linking randomly to one or the other, or even both (imagine updating this).

The bugs to be fixed are selected first for how obvious they are (likely to occur) and not how critical they are. This is why it's common that bugs that can totally wreck operation and lead to data loss may be left, if the occurence is rare or unlikely.

Everybody is in stress and the main goal is that you get the reviewed bug off your shoulders: if it's mildly reminiscent to something else, it's marked duplicate. If you can't reproduce it quickly, it's marked as fixed or not reproducible. Tricky bugs are marked "fact of life" or "deffered".

Successful companies and their products grow, but the way the products and resources are managed does not scale. Instead, programmers are expected to churn a major release every X months, screw everything else, and keep the cash flowing, the investors happy.

With Windows, we have a successful product that supports a huge ecosystem of applications (including legacy support), localization, usage cases etc. It's natural that in time, updates will become more rare, and will be much slower and more expensive to produce.

The trend of software-as-a-service is not coincidental with this situation. In 5 to 10 years the base software we use might be so complex and tough to work on, that the only way it can be sustained is by small, regular payments, and the updates will be small, incremental, security/performance oriented. No more big releases, no more rushes to fix bugs in the last moment.

This is the way evolution works. The other route is, of course, revolution...

The trend of software-as-a-service is not coincidental with this situation. In 5 to 10 years the base software we use might be so complex and tough to work on, that the only way it can be sustained is by small, regular payments, and the updates will be small, incremental, security/performance oriented. No more big releases, no more rushes to fix bugs in the last moment.

I think the interesting part will come when we see large, old code bases that started in the software-as-service world. A few years back I s

Three things that struck me a few months ago as I was installing dozens of little updates to my Gentoo system:1) Most open source apps do not suffer feature bloat. They aren't trying to entice new customers so they usually just do what they are supposed to do.

2) Updates are often done just to improve or optimize. Companies who are paying their programmers to churn out sellable products often can't afford to optimize every little bit of the app. Volunteers who just want to software to be its best can.

This was a similar story for Windows ME, in the end the time to release became more important than the quality of the product. I would like to see Vista delayed until it's ready, even if that's not for six more months. In my view that would earn Microsoft more points than meeting a schedule and then needing to (service) patch it fairly quickly.

Further delay aint happening. Vista will be out the door, regardless of the remaining bugs. They still have 'patch tuesday' to make updates, and the installation sequence itself already includes an initial update phase. So any really big bugs that remain present in the RTM build can still be fixed later.

I don't know. Few people upgrade their version of Windowsunless they're getting a new machine. However, lots of peopleare discovering that a 3 year old computer is perfectly capableof doing what they need it to do and so doesn't reallyneed to be replaced unless the hardware is failing.

Even more interesting, for the first time ever, Apple'sofferings are starting to be percieved as a real alternativethat is, arguably, comparably priced.

That update during the install is a great idea. I remember one of those worms made installing Windows hell. You'd install, then it'd reboot, and if it was connected to the Internet it'd be infected within about a minute. Too fast to install the necessary updates. I hope Microsoft gets vista right...

At the time it's released, Mac will have another OS out but that's beside the point. That only matters to people that are `on the fence` OS wise and not a significant number. In the halls of the OS engineers, it matters as it proves what insiders at MS have said that "Microsoft isn't able to ship products anymore [blogspot.com]."

When SP1 is released, there will be hoopla and hype that Vista will have even more features, be more stable, and even more secure.

To be fair, Windows Vista at Release Candidate is still leaps and bounds better than Windows ME was after service packs. Plus, if you were even slightly intelligent, you'd buy Windows 2000 instead of ME.

XP is going really cheap now. I think one of my friends got it for $80 or something. With Vista about to be released, they're trying to get the old XP backstock out the door. Just buy your XP disks now and hold them until the quads come out.

Depends how you interpret the figures. I have a stable, well configured Mac. Last week, I had a dodgy 3rd party app that crashed 3 times. Each time the Apple crash reporter asked me to send a report to Apple.

If I had been running a beta version of the operating system I would have gone ahead and sent, on the grounds that it might have been a bad interaction between app and OS. In the event I said no.

I wonder how long they ran them for?Some of them were probably trying to get it to crash, and that can distort the numbers.

I know a lot of people on here have Windows XP systems that have run forever as long as updates are made, but what's the average uptime for a Windows system? It could be that almost all Windows machines crash at some time during the beta period timeframe, in which case the 450,000 crashes would be expected.

I might expect most people to send the data to MS because you as beta tester wan

Uptime on the Vista beta boxes is likely to be low - on a test system, you're going to have frequent reboots, I would suspect. Besides, this is the home-user, desktop version - Longhorn Server is coming out later.

My Vista install has crashed a few times - 90% due to DivX not liking Vista, a few due to Media Center not liking DivX, and the rest video drivers crashing. All but twice Vista RESTARTED the driver and booted my game again, meaning I only saw two bluescreens.

The crash reports are for both the OS and applications running on it. Anytime an incompatible 3rd party app crashes, crash data is gathered and you are given the option to send it to MS. In addition, it is very likely that a person will try to run that same incompatible application over and over in hopes it will work.At any rate, my personal experience with Vista is that it's as solid as XP once you run RC1 or later. Apps do crash (usually older ones), but the OS itself is very stable.

I enjoy how the thought of buggy third party applications apparently never crosses Slashdot's collective mind. I know that 99% of crashes on my PC are third party applications that frankly probably ignored the documentation and did something stupid. Microsoft has good people working on finding programs that rely on undocumented behaviors and putting in various bypasses to deal with them, but you can't expect them to be able to test the hundreds of thousands of applications out there before the public beta

"Personally, I can't remember the last time I crashed _and_ decided to send the data to M$."

why not sometimes you get feedback which identifies the problem and a solution. You don't have to like microsoft to send in a crash report. It is in your own interest as well as microsoftsgot to admit i thought it was a one way street, but i know my brother got some feedback and identified a problem.

Windows Vista has a new app in the Control Panel called "Problem Reports and Solutions". This keeps track of all problem reports that have been submitted and what the response is from Microsoft. If there is a fix from MS, it will tell you (right now this tends to be a message saying the issue is fixed in pre-RTM builds). If it's a third-party application, you might get a message like "An analyst at Microsoft has investigated this problem and determined that an unkown error occurred in Adobe Acrobat Reader /

If it's a third-party application, you might get a message like "An analyst at Microsoft has investigated this problem and determined that an unkown error occurred in Adobe Acrobat Reader / Adobe Reader. This software was created by Adobe Systems Incorporated.", along with a link to the appropriate product support page on Adobe's website.

Doesn't this require the third-party application's developer to have signed the application's code using a VeriSign code signing certificate? At 499 USD per year plus wha

I tried to install Vista on three PCs, all of which passed Microsoft's Ready for Vista testing tool, but all three failed before they were able to sent any crash data back to Microsoft. Two installs hung due because Vista didn't like my SATA / motherboard combination. The other got its knickers twisted over my partitioning scheme. And that was before I got a chance to find out if any of my other hardware (printer, scanner, TV card, firewire,

Why would you install a beta version of an operating system and not send in crash reports?

Yes, in fact, I would. If I were beta-testing an OS, I would make sure I did that on an isolated machine, until I was certain that it was ready for being hooked into a network. And an isolated machine won't be able to send bug reports.

I don't know about Vista, but on XP the default is to submit crash reports for all crashes. That includes software you are yourself developing. Yes, you soon learn to switch that off, but at least some of those reports will be from developers writing code for Vista and submitting crash reports for their own software (or testers doing so).

FYI, I've been running Mandriva2006 Linux for months with no problems, rarely booting into WinXP for games. I'm sure there must have been a few minor crashed apps with this setup in the past few years, but I'm not remembering them atm. Happy computing:-)

I'm getting a little tired of people comparing a computer running an OS to a TV set or similar.

The TV will do one thing, and one thing only. That's displaying an analog signal as moving images and sound. That's all. The day that's all Windows will ever have to do, that's the day you can demand a refund.

The TV will do one thing, and one thing only. That's displaying an analog signal as moving images and sound. That's all. The day that's all Windows will ever have to do, that's the day you can demand a refund.

It also decrypts the signal from the receiver, carefully avoiding the dreaded analog hole. A modern TV uses more processing power to restrict my freedom than my PC did ten years ago to enhance it.

Come to think of it, that'd be an interesting prospect for a sci-fi story - a civilization where more c

You're ignorant. From your post, it seems you think that the crashes were OS crashes, which is not true. Most (or all?) of the crash information is about applications crashing, not the whole OS. Any application, not just OS code or Microsoft apps.

It's more akin to you turning on your TV and finding out that your channels suck.

Or turned off crash reporting, or a behind a strict firewall, or never finished installing the thing, or never managed to get their network card/modem working, or don't didn't use it on an Internet connected PC.

When you look at the possibilities, it's almost certain that EVERY user experienced some kind of crash, however minor. Whether that reflects on the state of Vista, or the state of modern operating systems in general, I don't know.

"This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly while looking for errors."

I for one would love to know more about the tools they use for automated testing.

In my company, we have a build & testing server running compiler and NUnit [nunit.org] tests for all data-layer tests (complete tests like "load all of everything" and more specific tests like "authorise user with known bad credentials - expect login-failure") alongside NUnitForms [sourceforge.net] tests for the application-layer (random, frantic clic

From every point of view it seems to make more sense. They spend less money, get a more reliable product that can run very nicely on existing hardware, get some good press for a change, and benefit from the work of unpaid open-source programmers all over the world. But it isn't their way.

yeah, because *every* OS must be unix-based because it's perfect in every way, can't be improved. The peak of OS tech was achieved 30 years ago. [face_rollseyes]

As for Apple, I wish that they had succeeded with Copeland, so there would still be at least one mainstream OS that wasn't Unix or NT based. Apple chose NexT (the BSD version (there was also an NT version)) out of desperation, not because they so loved BSD or Unix.

Apple was never going to succeed with Copland. Copland was a disjointed mess of technologies. Apple's other choice before NeXT was BeOS, also based on UNIX. Because Apple was desperate for a new OS doesn't mean the fact that they went with a UNIX-based solution was a mistake or something they settled on with reservations. On the contrary, I'm surprised anyone is arguing such given all the open source software that now happily runs on OS X and how open the system really is.There is something to be said f

Because Apple was desperate for a new OS doesn't mean the fact that they went with a UNIX-based solution was a mistake or something they settled on with reservations. On the contrary, I'm surprised anyone is arguing such given all the open source software that now happily runs on OS X and how open the system really is.

>Spend some money on improving Wine (it would be really easy for them, compared to anyone else who wants to do it), et voila -- near-perfect backward compatibility

I don't think so. It is probably possible (though not easy) to get Wine working with any particular application you choose, though it may take more or less time depending on the development team you have. But to have something that works with *every* application? There are many millions of Windows apps out there, a large percentage of wh

If you knew much about Windows development, you would know that Microsoft spend a HUGE amount of time making sure they don't break popular programs between versions of Windows, and that is based on upgrading a similar code base. Getting wine up to that level would take years, and might not be possible (there are a few "WONTFIX" bugs in Wine due to programs doing horrible things which involve writing all over memory, which would require root access on linux).

Something that I haven't heard much recently is about Vista compatibility. MS has said before that it will be compatible and for most software and hardware, it was true in previous versions. But there were enough exceptions. ME was supposed to be backwards compatible. But many specialized drivers had to be written for it. XP definitely required some driver updates. Since Vista is a architectural change, so one would except some compatibility issues especially when DRM and enhanced security is thrown into the mix.

Technically would MS classify incompatibility as not a a bug, especially if is does not cause a crash?

more than half a million installed, and 450,000 sent back crash data... so even if we assume it was nearly a million, that's 50% crash rate. I'd guess it was way higher even than that. So, over half of the systems were crashing bad enough for Microsoft to care? Wow! What exactly is the problem? I thought this was supposed to be a newer, better version. Wouldn't we see a 10% crash rate, or even a 25% crash rate at this point if things were really getting any better?

Has anyone considered that MS is actually trying to make a decent OS here? Sure, it's fun to poke fun at them for all the crashes and bugs, but isn't that the ENTIRE point of the 'release early, release often' mindset?

At least they're trying to find their bugs, at least they are running a widespread beta.

IIRC it's the monitoring room for the Office Crash Assistant, the place where you send your data to after you crash. They analyse this data attempting to find patterns that lead to crashes. (I'm not sure how good this helps Office, but for Windows itself it's an excellent tool to find broken driver releases.)

Hardware is almost required to debug some low-level system code. Real-time stuff, like device drivers and scheduler really requires hardware tracer to determine what happened and when.

With XP, almost all of the crashes are due to bad (usually non-MS) device drivers. If you run a system with pure MS drivers and quality hardware you'll never see a BSOD. If you run the usual business suite of software (Office, Outlook, IE) you probably never see an application crash.

It's the crappy hardware and badly written drivers that cause the crashes. That's the difference with Apple.... since they control the hardware there's less crashes due to bad hardware and there are fewer third-party drivers for Mac hardware. The software is probably the same quality.

Hardware is almost required to debug some low-level system code. Real-time stuff, like device drivers and scheduler really requires hardware tracer to determine what happened and when

Huh ? This is called a serial console terminal, and I wouldn't call a terminal a 'hardware tracer'. Other OS just use a serial console to debug device drivers and scheduler, with most debugging done in software.

With XP, almost all of the crashes are due to bad (usually non-MS) device drivers. If you run a system with pure MS dr

This is absolutely irrelevant. In real terms, most people see system crashes due to malware entering the machine. Is Microsoft doing something about security? something effective, because if they aren't, Vista will not change anything. Microsoft has *always* had security as a second thought. I am not expecting that to change.

If you run a system with pure MS drivers and quality hardware you'll never see a BSOD

Does Microsoft make any video drivers that can even run the Aero GUI? Or, by "quality hardware" do you mean really old generic hardware supported by MS's generic drivers? I've never seen any MS drivers for my scanner, printer, webcam... basically nothing in my "quality" system other than the MS keyboard. So, I don't know if what you propose is even possible.

While there are lots of entries in the MS KB that are totally due to 3rd party drivers, there are many that are not. So, even if what you propose is possible, it's unlikely to be correct.

If you run the usual business suite of software (Office, Outlook, IE) you probably never see an application crash.

Okay, you're high, aren't you?

Exploits come out every other day to crash IE And, there are hundreds if not thousands of MS KB articles regarding Outlook crashes. Office? I've seen it crash many times due to internal bugs. And, when it crashes, you can't shut down Windows because it tells you that you must exit all Office apps first - thanks to MS's wonderful OS integration.

It's the crappy hardware and badly written drivers that cause the crashes. That's the difference with Apple.... since they control the hardware there's less crashes due to bad hardware and there are fewer third-party drivers for Mac hardware. The software is probably the same quality.

One thing that Apple did when they changed to OS X was to revise the API. Overall they reduced the number of API calls from like 9,000 to 6,000. For legacy systems, Apple created an emulation environment. Apple did sacrific

The Win32 API unfortunately has only gotten larger with each new version as MS had decided to make backwards compatibility more of a priority than other goals. I think there are some 40,000 documented API calls. Then there are the undocumented ones. At some point MS has to clean up their API and deprecate some of them. At this point it will be very painful and legacy systems will not work. I'm not sure if Vista is headed in that direction.

C'mon, don't you know anything? It is obviously where their staff of 10,000 monkeys press buttons randomly on keyboards of pcs running Vista. This is how they test for their bugs. If the monkeys can't find it, Joe Sixpack should be safe and secure.

And, however much the software engineering world is predominantly male, why is there only 1 lady in the room?

We don't know there was "only one" lady in the room. We can only be sure that (a) there is at most one lady in the room and (b) that there is exactly one woman in the room. This is assuming the photographer is male.

Waiting for SP2 will take around 2 years after Vista is released. Assuming an early '07 launch, SP1 should be out by the end of '07. By then, both Microsoft and other hardware vendors should have their bugs & drivers worked out. For XP, I waited until SP1a and it worked fine.

It's funny, though, that neither you nor I nor a lot of other/.'ers would even touch a brand new release of Windows. I just see it as moving from 500,000 beta-testers to 50,000,000 beta-testers.